Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Review: Lamentations of the Flame Princess

Okay, so I have seen a lot of references to the Lamentations of the Flame Princess (LotFP) rules by James Edward Raggi IV and finally decided to give it proper full read and do a review.  (FYI, the version I reviewed was the "no art" free version from the website.)   Right off, I was intrigued by the subtitle: "WEIRD FANTASY Role-Playing".  I knew that it was a D&D old school renaissance game, but this subtitle suggested that these rules would have a different flavor or texture to them.  As you may have seen in earlier posts of mine I am not a fan of OSR rules but I was willing to give it a look based on the subtitle.

Diving in I found it to be a huge disappointment.  LotFP is pretty much just another OSR game. There are a lot of tweaks and cleaned-up bits.  Alignment is just Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic.  Halflings are available as a playable demi-human class.  And so on.

So where's the "weird fantasy" stuff?  Well as far as I can see there isn't any.  It's just a vanilla OSR game.

When an author says there's going to be some weird content, I'm expecting something along the lines of Wermspittle over on the Hereticwerks blog.  Wermspittle is a seriously weird, creepy setting.

Bottom line: if you're looking for a walk on the weird side, skip LotFP, go straight to Wermspittle.

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